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He will also be paired with former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton as his deputy secretary of state, one of the sources added, with Bolton handling day-to-day management of the department.

John Bolton? This is hardly unexpected, but holy shit. Bolton is a lunatic. Here he is on Fox News today:

Bolton is seriously suggesting that the hacks into Democratic Party computers might have been false flag operations, presumably with the goal of making it look like Russia supported Donald Trump. This would ruin Trump’s reputation and guarantee a win for Hillary Clinton.

This is completely nuts. It’s deranged. It’s unhinged. And it doesn’t even make sense on its own terms. No campaign in its right mind would do this, and certainly not a campaign desperately trying to keep the word “email” in any form out of the public discourse.

Dark insinuations of false flag operations are a favorite among conspiracy theorists. They think it makes them sound sophisticated and worldly. This means that either Bolton is a conspiracy theorist or else he doesn’t mind sounding like one if that’s what it take to defend his side. And soon he’ll be the #2 guy at State, the person really running things while Tillerson provides the public face. God help us.

Fact:

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